The Strauss Cabarets

Leo Strauss’s works range from comic songs to sonnets. Although his style is whimsical, his works occasionally have a dark and even despairing edge. With lines like “we are buried here alive” in a poem about the crowded conditions of the ghetto, he confronts the truly desperate nature of the prisoners’ situation. Other pieces, however, appear unrelated to Terezín/Theresienstadt, or engage with life in the ghetto in a much lighter way. Perhaps these works were written for the Blockveranstaltungen held in the hospitals and lodgings of the elderly, where their suffering audiences needed no reminder of the miserable conditions in which they lived. Instead, as Myra Strauss-Gruhenberg wrote in her own essay published here, the most urgent need was “to distract the old and the sick as soon as possible from their cares.” Her single poem in this collection, “The Last Cigarette,” describes a moment of calm enjoyed by a woman who, by all accounts, was the center of a maelstrom of creative activity.